
Lincoln vs. Davis
The War of the Presidents
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Narrated by:
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Rick Adamson
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By:
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Nigel Hamilton
About this listen
From a renowned biographer comes the greatest untold story of the Civil War: how two American presidents faced off as the fate of the nation hung in the balance—and how Abraham Lincoln came to embrace emancipation as the last, best chance to save the Union.
Of all the books written on Abraham Lincoln, there has been one surprising gap: the drama of how the “railsplitter” from Illinois grew into his critical role as U.S. commander-in-chief, and managed to outwit his formidable opponent, Jefferson Davis, in what remains history's only military faceoff between rival American presidents. Davis was a trained soldier and war hero; Lincoln a country lawyer who had only briefly served in the militia. Confronted with the most violent and challenging war ever seen on American soil, Lincoln seemed ill-suited to the task: inexperienced, indecisive, and a poor judge of people’s motives, he allowed his administration's war policies to be sabotaged by fickle, faithless cabinet officials while entrusting command of his army to a preening young officer named George McClellan–whose defeat in battle left Washington, the nation’s capital, at the mercy of General Robert E. Lee, Davis’s star performer.
The war almost ended there. But in a Shakespearean twist, Lincoln summoned the courage to make, at last, a climactic decision: issuing as a “military necessity” a proclamation freeing the 3.5 million enslaved Americans without whom the South could not feed or fund their armed insurrection. The new war policy doomed the rebellion—which was in dire need of support from Europe, none of whose governments now would dare to recognize rebel “independence” in a war openly fought over slavery. The fate of President Davis was sealed.
With a cast of unforgettable characters, from first ladies to fugitive coachmen to treasonous cabinet officials, Lincoln vs. Davis is a spellbinding dual biography from renowned presidential chronicler Nigel Hamilton: a saga that will surprise, touch, and enthrall.
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-
Story
More than a century after he dominated American politics, Woodrow Wilson still fascinates. With panoramic sweep, Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn reassesses his life and his role in the movements for racial equality and women’s suffrage. The Wilson that emerges is a man superbly unsuited to the moment when he ascended to the presidency in 1912, as the struggle for women’s voting rights in America reached the tipping point.
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A very Detailed and Pedantic Biography
- By bgrant on 03-28-25
By: Christopher Cox
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A Hell of a Storm
- The Battle for Kansas, the End of Compromise, and the Coming of the Civil War
- By: David S. Brown
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The history of the United States was shaped by a series of sectional compromises—the Constitutional Convention, the Missouri Compromise in 1820, and the Compromise of 1850. While these accords formed an imperfect republic, or “a house divided,” as Abraham Lincoln put it, the country nevertheless remained united. But then in 1854, this three-generations system suddenly blew up with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, leading to a nearly fatal rupture in the union, described here by David S. Brown in riveting detail.
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No narrative
- By JFG on 10-07-24
By: David S. Brown
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American Civil Wars
- A Continental History, 1850-1873
- By: Alan Taylor
- Narrated by: Graham Winton
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights. Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story, from Joseph Hooker, whose timidity in crisis was exploited by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville, to Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black abolitionists whose critical work in Canada and the United States advanced emancipation and the enrollment of Black soldiers in Union armies.
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fascinating!
- By Brandon Marken on 07-12-24
By: Alan Taylor
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America First
- Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War
- By: H. W. Brands
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands narrates the fierce debate over America's role in the world in the runup to World War II through its two most important figures: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who advocated intervention, and his isolationist nemesis, aviator and popular hero Charles Lindbergh.
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Another American History Pearl from H.W. Brands
- By Paul W. Brazis on 10-05-24
By: H. W. Brands
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Martin Van Buren
- America's First Politician
- By: James M. Bradley
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 26 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This new biography of Van Buren—the first full-scale portrait in four decades—charts his ascent from a tavern in the Hudson Valley to the presidency, concluding with his late-career involvement in an antislavery movement. Offering vivid profiles of the day's leading figures (Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, John Quincy Adams, DeWitt Clinton, James K. Polk), James Bradley's book depicts the struggle for power in the tumultuous decades leading up to the Civil War.
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Terrific Political Biography
- By steve thomas on 03-09-25
By: James M. Bradley
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The Mantle of Command
- FDR at War, 1941–1942
- By: Nigel Hamilton
- Narrated by: Brad Sanders
- Length: 20 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Based on years of archival research and interviews with the last surviving aides and Roosevelt family members, Nigel Hamilton offers a definitive account of FDR’s masterful - and underappreciated - command of the Allied war effort. Hamilton takes listeners inside FDR’s White House Oval Study - his personal command center - and into the meetings where he battled with Churchill about strategy and tactics and overrode the near mutinies of his own generals and secretary of war.
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Great Book, Terrible Narration
- By Ross Mackey on 04-11-22
By: Nigel Hamilton
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Woodrow Wilson
- The Light Withdrawn
- By: Christopher Cox
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 25 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
More than a century after he dominated American politics, Woodrow Wilson still fascinates. With panoramic sweep, Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn reassesses his life and his role in the movements for racial equality and women’s suffrage. The Wilson that emerges is a man superbly unsuited to the moment when he ascended to the presidency in 1912, as the struggle for women’s voting rights in America reached the tipping point.
-
-
A very Detailed and Pedantic Biography
- By bgrant on 03-28-25
By: Christopher Cox
-
A Hell of a Storm
- The Battle for Kansas, the End of Compromise, and the Coming of the Civil War
- By: David S. Brown
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The history of the United States was shaped by a series of sectional compromises—the Constitutional Convention, the Missouri Compromise in 1820, and the Compromise of 1850. While these accords formed an imperfect republic, or “a house divided,” as Abraham Lincoln put it, the country nevertheless remained united. But then in 1854, this three-generations system suddenly blew up with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, leading to a nearly fatal rupture in the union, described here by David S. Brown in riveting detail.
-
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No narrative
- By JFG on 10-07-24
By: David S. Brown
-
American Civil Wars
- A Continental History, 1850-1873
- By: Alan Taylor
- Narrated by: Graham Winton
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights. Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story, from Joseph Hooker, whose timidity in crisis was exploited by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville, to Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black abolitionists whose critical work in Canada and the United States advanced emancipation and the enrollment of Black soldiers in Union armies.
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fascinating!
- By Brandon Marken on 07-12-24
By: Alan Taylor
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America First
- Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War
- By: H. W. Brands
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands narrates the fierce debate over America's role in the world in the runup to World War II through its two most important figures: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who advocated intervention, and his isolationist nemesis, aviator and popular hero Charles Lindbergh.
-
-
Another American History Pearl from H.W. Brands
- By Paul W. Brazis on 10-05-24
By: H. W. Brands
-
Martin Van Buren
- America's First Politician
- By: James M. Bradley
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 26 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
This new biography of Van Buren—the first full-scale portrait in four decades—charts his ascent from a tavern in the Hudson Valley to the presidency, concluding with his late-career involvement in an antislavery movement. Offering vivid profiles of the day's leading figures (Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, John Quincy Adams, DeWitt Clinton, James K. Polk), James Bradley's book depicts the struggle for power in the tumultuous decades leading up to the Civil War.
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Terrific Political Biography
- By steve thomas on 03-09-25
By: James M. Bradley
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Wide Awake
- The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War
- By: Jon Grinspan
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
At the start of the 1860 presidential campaign, a handful of fired-up young Northerners appeared as bodyguards to defend anti-slavery stump speakers from frequent attacks. The group called themselves the Wide Awakes. Soon, hundreds of thousands of young White and Black men, and a number of women, were organizing boisterous, uniformed, torch-bearing brigades of their own. These Wide Awakes--mostly working-class Americans in their twenties--became one of the largest, most spectacular, and most influential political movements in our history.
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Interesting account
- By MikeEC on 06-06-24
By: Jon Grinspan
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Embattled Rebel
- Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Civil War
- By: James M. McPherson
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 5 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
History has not been kind to Jefferson Davis. Many Americans of his own time and in later generations considered him an incompetent leader, not to mention a traitor. Not so, argues James M. McPherson. In Embattled Rebel, McPherson shows us that Davis might have been on the wrong side of history, but that it is too easy to diminish him because of his cause’s failure. Gravely ill throughout much of the Civil War, Davis nevertheless shaped and articulated the principal policy of the Confederacy—the quest for independent nationhood—with clarity and force.
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Interesting
- By Jean on 10-18-14
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Andrew Johnson
- The American Presidents Series: The 17th President, 1865-1869
- By: Annette Gordon-Reed, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. - editor, Sean Wilentz - editor
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Andrew Johnson never expected to be president. But just six weeks after becoming Abraham Lincoln's vice president, the events at Ford's Theatre thrust him into the nation's highest office. Johnson faced a nearly impossible task—to succeed America's greatest chief executive, to bind the nation's wounds after the Civil War, and to work with a Congress controlled by the so-called Radical Republicans. Annette Gordon-Reed, one of America's leading historians of slavery, shows how ill-suited Johnson was for this daunting task.
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Andrew Johnson
- By Leonid Volodin on 01-28-25
By: Annette Gordon-Reed, and others
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Ascent to Power
- How Truman Emerged from Roosevelt's Shadow and Remade the World
- By: David L. Roll
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 20 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Spanning the years of transition, 1944 to 1948, Ascent to Power illuminates Truman’s struggles to emerge as president in his own right. Yet, from a relatively unknown Missouri senator to the most powerful man on Earth, Truman’s legacy transcends. With his come-from-behind campaign in the fall of 1948, his courageous civil rights advocacy, and his role in liberating millions from militarist governments and brutal occupations, Truman’s decisions during these pivotal years changed the course of the world in ways so significant we live with them today.
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Truman defeated Republican use of Dark Psychology
- By sunao mind☯️ heart ❤️ on 01-30-25
By: David L. Roll
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The Great Abolitionist
- Charles Sumner and the Fight for a More Perfect Union
- By: Stephen Puleo
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 17 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Great Abolitionist is the first major biography of Charles Sumner to be published in over fifty years. Acclaimed historian Stephen Puleo relates the story of one of the most influential non-presidents in American history with evocative and accessible prose, transporting listeners back to an era when our leaders exhibited true courage and authenticity in the face of unprecedented challenges.
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The heart of Charles Sumner
- By Susan on 03-29-25
By: Stephen Puleo
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Making the Presidency
- John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic
- By: Lindsay M. Chervinsky
- Narrated by: Lindsay M. Chervinsky
- Length: 14 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The United States of 1797 faced enormous challenges. The father of the new nation, George Washington, left his vice president, John Adams, with relatively little guidance and impossible expectations to meet. Adams was confronted with intense partisan divides, debates over citizenship, fears of political violence, potential for foreign conflict with France and Britain, and a nation unsure that the presidency could even work without Washington at the helm. Making the Presidency is an exploration of the second US presidency, a period critical to the survival of the American republic.
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A non-comprehensive deep cut on Adam's Presiency
- By DB1089 on 09-22-24
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Land Between the Rivers
- A 5,000-Year History of Iraq
- By: Bartle Bull
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 22 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Bull chronicles the story of Iraq from the exploits of Gilgamesh to the fall of the Iraqi monarchy that ushered in its modern era. The land between the rivers has been the melting pot and battleground of countless outsiders. Here, Judaism was born and the Sunni-Shia schism took its bloody shape.
By: Bartle Bull
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Abraham Lincoln
- A Life
- By: Michael Burlingame
- Narrated by: Douglas R Pratt
- Length: 32 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Hailed as the definitive portrait of the sixteenth president, Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame's impressive two-volume biography has been masterfully abridged and revised. Based on deep research in unpublished sources as well as newly digitized sources, this work reveals how Lincoln's character and personality were the North's secret weapon in the Civil War, the key variables that spelled the difference between victory and defeat. He was a model of psychological maturity and a fully individuated man whose influence remains unrivaled in the history of American public life.
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What an Extraordinary Human Being!
- By joan m. on 09-24-24
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The Last Tsar
- The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs
- By: Tsuyoshi Hasegawa
- Narrated by: Gareth Armstrong
- Length: 13 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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When Tsar Nicholas II fell from power in 1917, Imperial Russia faced a series of overlapping crises, from war to social unrest. Though Nicholas’s life is often described as tragic, it was not fate that doomed the Romanovs—it was poor leadership and a blinkered faith in autocracy. Based on a trove of new archival discoveries, The Last Tsar narrates how Nicholas’s resistance to reform doomed the monarchy.
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Confusion
- By Michael L. Cook on 01-24-25
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The General vs. the President
- MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War
- By: H. W. Brands
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 15 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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From master storyteller and historian H. W. Brands comes the riveting story of how President Harry Truman and General Douglas MacArthur squared off to decide America's future in the aftermath of World War II.
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A Vivid Dramatic Accounting
- By Jean on 11-11-16
By: H. W. Brands
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Darkest Hour
- How Churchill Brought England Back from the Brink
- By: Anthony McCarten
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 6 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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May 1940. Britain is at war, Winston Churchill has unexpectedly been promoted to prime minister, and the horrors of Blitzkrieg witness one Western European democracy fall after another in rapid succession. Facing this horror, with pen in hand and typist-secretary at the ready, Churchill wonders what words could capture the public mood when the invasion of Britain seems mere hours away. It is this fascinating period that Anthony McCarten captures in this deeply researched and wonderfully written new book, The Darkest Hour.
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Gripping
- By Jean on 12-06-17
By: Anthony McCarten
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Cassino '44
- The Brutal Battle for Rome
- By: James Holland
- Narrated by: Al Murray
- Length: 19 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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As the new year of 1944 began in Italy, the Allied army’s momentum had ground to a halt just south of the vaunted German Gustav Line of defense, far short of their initial objective of liberating Rome by Christmas. The fighting up the Italian peninsula had been brutal—rugged terrain, fierce resistance, terrible weather. While Allied leaders in London prepared for the cross-Channel invasion of France later that spring, the war in the West hinged in Italy.
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No “petulant hatred” found
- By Gabby J on 11-21-24
By: James Holland
What listeners say about Lincoln vs. Davis
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Fernando U.
- 01-14-25
Good biographical perspective
This was an insightful biography of two consequential men in our American story . It gave a great portrayal of context of the tumultuous times leading up to and during the Civil War. It got inside of the minds and motives of these men and their influencers so you come away with a deeper understanding of how and why history unfolded the way it did. It held my interest throughout.
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- Amazon Customer
- 11-07-24
loved the insights of inner cabinets.
Minot stories seemed unresearched, like how stonewall got his nickname bit its a great book. the inside info from both cabinets and influences of the wives helps flesh out the men.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Evan
- 02-08-25
Evan's Review
Different from most Civil War books. This compares Lincoln and Davis leadership styles Davis the military man Lincoln the policial man. I was surprise how much time and detail was spent with Lincoln dealing with McCellan. Another surprise how the book ends with Lincoln signing the Enmcation Procmantion. I strongly recommend the book
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- Dave SHA
- 12-18-24
Mistakes and compromises I never knew
I learned so much. About both of these people.I learned things that nobody had taught us before.There was no glorification of either character in here. Only the facts about what they were stuck with and what they were dealt and how they handled it. And most of the time, how quickly they realized well, this isn't going to work. Then what is clear to us now, it was so difficult for them to see. In the end,that's what secured the end of the war for them. But also a future for us in America.
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- Martin J Dunleavy
- 02-09-25
Great book should’ve gone to the end of the war
Really fascinating side-by-side biographies, but was very disappointed that it ended with the emancipation proclamation. Instead of going to the end of the war would’ve been a five star book because of the premature ending. I dropped a star.
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- J B Tipton
- 02-14-25
Disappointing
I have a hundred books on the Civil War area in my library. This is my least favorite. Repeated unsupported opinions propounded in a snide, condescending tone. The author supports his opinions by stating that this is what historians have decided - not many historians or some historians, just historians.
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